a comedy of death
by Douglas Messerli
Jiři Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal
(screenplay, based on Hrabal’s fiction), Jiři Menzel (director) Ostre Sledované Viaky (Closely Watched Trains) / 1966
Clearly a kind of “mamma’s boy,” revealed through his mother’s loving attention to the uniform she has made for him as a stationmaster’s assistant, Miloš, living in a small backwater town, sets off into the world with a job, mostly, of slowing down and speeding up trains, saluting them as they pass.
Shy, painfully uncomfortable around his train-riding girlfriend (a “nice girl” he reassures his colleague), Miloš looks up to Hubička with a kind of grudging admiration. When he, himself, attempts to have sex with the willing girl, he fails, presumably because of his sexual inexperience. So far, the film has revealed itself, accordingly, as a comedy, with Miloš serving as a kind Buster Keaton figure, while the rest of the eccentric gathering underline Menzel’s sly Eastern European wit.
Thus, has Menzel introduced into this, at first, seemingly comic work, a series of surrealist acts representing the utter chaos and brutality of war, and the desperateness of young people facing the broader world of social relationships and sexual activity. Although treated comically—the bombing scene, in particular, calls up Keaton in works such as Steamboat Bill Jr.—the following episodes take us closer and closer to the true violence lying just below the everyday events of this small Czech village.
Approaching the Stationmaster’s wife,
who sits with, what my World Film
Directors volume describes as “an ailing” goose between her legs, Miloš
indicates that he would like her to help him with his sexual afflictions. In
itself it is simply another visual comic gag, a sort “Leda and the Swan” nudge
into surreality. But, in fact, the woman is not stroking the goose’s neck to
nurse it, but is force-feeding the poor animal so that its liver might
eventually be converted into foie gras.
Once more, comedy and cruelty are conjoined in Menzel’s and Hrabal’s tale.
Hubička has taken his young assistant into his confidence, asking the
young man to slow down the train just enough so that he might drop the bomb
onto its roof. But just a few moments before the train is scheduled to arrive,
the local Councilor shows up with railroad authorities and the telegrapher’s
angry mother to question Hubička about his sexual activities with the girl.
Miloš must take the bomb without his superior (even in front of the Nazi
Councilor and his associates, climb a train stanchion, and drop it into a
passing railway car.
He successfully completes his act, but unexpectedly, a guard on the
train witnesses his actions and shoots him dead. The train moves on down the
tracks, a few minutes later blowing up in a whirlwind of debris that reaches
back to the station, returning the poor boy’s hat. The film ends with Hubička’s
empty laughter, in delight for having achieved his ends, but certainly without
the knowledge that it has destroyed his young assistant’s life. Ironically, the
young man who wanted an uneventful life has become an unidentified hero.
In a somewhat uncomfortable interview with Mendel after the film,
screenwriter Philip Kaufman attempted to ask a question about whether or not
the boy really had a problem with premature ejaculation or whether the doctor
had diagnosed it merely because he had suffered it himself. Perhaps
misunderstanding the query in translation (and having played the doctor
himself), Menzel blushed brightly, something his biographers describe him doing
often when approached with the subject of sex. While clearly completely
embracing open sexuality, Mendel is apparently, like his hero, somewhat awkward
about his own body.
Menzel is said
to be spectacularly accident-prone, liable
to half-blind
himself while sweeping the floor, and to
break ribs when
he tries to fix the television aerial.
(World Film Directors, Volume 2)
There is something endearing about
an artist who is so aware of his own bodily movements and the carnal actions of
the body in space which of themselves may result in serious accident or, as we
see in this gentle movie, suicide and death. The marvel of Keaton or Chaplin,
for example, is that even walking across the room might result, at any moment,
in a kind of impossibility. Movement forward for figures such as these
comedians, among whom I would count Menzel as well as Samuel Beckett’s
characters, is like a tightrope walk (Menzel, indeed, played tightrope walkers
in his films Capricious Summer and Crime in the Nightclub), a miracle of
survival even if always on the verge of disaster.
Los Angeles, September 24, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position (October 2013).
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